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Q&A with Charles Dugas of Element AI

Systems of Artificial Intelligence in the Insurance Industry with Charles Dugas

On Tuesday, April 16th, 2019, Charles Dugas, PhD, Head of Insurance at Element AI presented the Keynote address at the CSIO 2019 Members’ Meeting. In this Q&A, Charles provides some Insights into how insurance companies can better approach the possibilities of artificial intelligence (AI) to develop and implement a strategic roadmap for benefitting from artificial intelligence capabilities across their organizations.

Q:The title of your presentation is “Setting the Stage for Systems of Intelligence”, can you explain this title?

Charles Dugas: A System of Intelligence sits in-between the systems by which customers and other parties communicate their information (called systems of engagement)—and the systems that collect and store this information (called systems of record). Systems of intelligence leverage AI capabilities to process incoming information in order to support decisions made in the context of different roles in different departments of the company.

Q:What do you want the attendees at this year’s CSIO keynote session to learn and take away?

CD: Insurers have various systems of records for underwriting, claims, billing, customer relationship management (CRM), etc. Setting up an AI for each of these individual systems of record creates AI silos across the company, which should be avoided, the same way we avoid setting up data silos. In order to provide decision support that accounts for a rich context, AI must be connected to these multiple systems so that it can connect the dots between what’s happening in various areas of the company. That is the essence of a system of intelligence.

Q:What is your take on how the insurance industry is embracing the opportunities and adoption of AI, and what may be holding the industry back?

CD: By now, everyone has heard about AI and awareness of it has reached the executive boardroom. Insurers know they need to adopt AI, but they’re confronted with the difficulty of moving from isolated use cases to a holistic approach that is both efficient and scalable. Many AI implementations will require a human-in-the-loop process whereby AI interacts with employees and learns from them. This feedback loop mechanism is a non-trivial aspect of AI software and that’s where systems of intelligence come into play.

Q:What are some themes and discussions that you see being addressed in the keynote presentation?

CD: CSIO does an important job in defining a common data language for the insurance industry and as we know, AI is about understanding data. Having data standards such as those provided by CSIO is a key enabler in building AI models that understand the insurance language and provides an accelerated means of interoperability into an insurance environment.

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